Where to get PHP 5.6.20 for Windows?

  • My WP site was recently hacked, so I want to upgrade. It’s running on Windows Server 2008. The WP upgrade page tells me that “WordPress 5.4.1 requires PHP version 5.6.20 or higher. You are running version 5.4.24”.
    The only PHP release that I can find for Windows is v7.*. I have installed v7.4.6, but my WP site returns an error with that release.
    Can anyone direct me to a download site which had older PHP versions for Windows – specifically v5.6.20?

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by Jan Dembowski.
Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Please look at https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php where you will see that PHP 5.6 (which is the minimum version you can use) is a year and a half past its End Of Life, so it does not get any security updates. It is not a good idea to go backward that way.
    You can use 7.2 or 7.3, or the latest like you already tried, but each will need some updates in your plugins/themes. I would suggest you stay with the 7.4 that you have, and fix the errors that you have.

    Dion

    (@diondesigns)

    You can find older releases of PHP for Windows here:

    https://windows.php.net/downloads/releases/archives/

    It’s not a good idea to use a version of PHP less than 7.2.0 with WordPress 5.3 or later. Recent versions of WordPress contain code (a PHP implementation of libsodium) that runs brutally slow with those older PHP versions.

    I second that you should use at least 7.2. If any plugin or your theme doesn′t work with 7.2, try 7.1 or 7.0, which are also end of life but more up to date.

    Thread Starter ianmanning

    (@ianmanning)

    OK I’ll try 7.2 – thanks for all the help

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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